From the comments over at Crooked Timber comes this great quote from de Toqueville:

All free nations are vainglorious, but national pride is not displayed by all in the same manner. The Americans, in their intercourse with strangers, appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise. The most slender eulogy is acceptable to them, the most exalted seldom contents them; they unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties, they fall to praising themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes. Their vanity is not only greedy, but restless and jealous; it will grant nothing, while it demands everything, but is ready to beg and to quarrel at the same time.

If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a fine one, “Ay,” he replies, “there is not its equal in the world.” If I applaud the freedom that its inhabitants enjoy, he answers: “Freedom is a fine thing, but few nations are worthy to enjoy it.” If I remark on the purity of morals that distinguishes the United States, “I can imagine,” says he, “that a stranger, who has witnessed the corruption that prevails in other nations, would be astonished at the difference.” At length I leave him to the contemplation of himself; but he returns to the charge and does not desist till he has got me to repeat all I had just been saying. It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it.

It’s amazing to me how much is as true now as it was then…

Via MeFi, recomposited color photographs from the turn of the century at the Library of Congress’s online exhibition of Prokudin-Gorskii. Some of my favorites include Jewish children with their teacher, the very fat Emir of Bukhara, the beautiful monastery, the cryptic fabric merchant, and the Uzbek woman.

Cool. I always wanted to know how to read someone the Riot Act:

Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons being assembled immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George for preventing tumultuous and riotous assemblies. God save the King.

Via The Volokh Conspiracy

Brad DeLong’s murmurings on Richard Ben Cramer’s book, How Israel Lost, makes it sound like just the book I need to read to better understand the underpinnings of the divestment debate that Ranjit pointed me out to. I can just add it to the queue of books I suppose…

The French are rather bloody:

Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons !
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons !

Happy Bastille Day!

Kevin Drum has an argument about how the Soviet Union was already in collapse in 1980, but nobody knew it, not even Reagan. Therefore, Reagan’s arms buildup was the straw that broke the Russian economy’s back, rather than the the mighty branch that beat it into submission. The danger of Reagan’s hagiography is that it supports the current administration’s attitude towards external threats — if you stand firm, puff out your chest, and take a few practice swings with the old bat, your opponents will back down. But this is not the story that should be learned from Reagan’s legacy.

Chris Butler (Mr. B), a history teacher at my high school, designed and wrote historical simulation games with a friend of my brother’s, Paul Marty. There was one called Waters of Babylon, where you played merchants and kings in city states, traded, waged war, and so on. It was designed to illustrate the balance of power in the area. The one I remember best was a computer game called Diocletian, which was a simulation of the end days of the united Roman Empire. Diocletian was the emperor who split the emipre into the Eastern (centered at Byzantium) and Western (centered at Rome) halves. In the game, you had rebellious governors in the provinces, an insufficiently small army, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and other groups invading from all sides, and an inefficient tax collection scheme.

Austin Amaya and I managed to survive in the game by first conquering all of North Africa and the Middle East and then taking over northern Europe. Endless military expansion was the only way to avoid the collapse of the empire, but the only reason we were successful was that nobody could invade from off the borders of the computer simulation. This was Hitler’s strategy in WWII as well. Games like Civilization teach you the same lessons, I think. The question I’m left with is this — to what extent are the dynamics of these games informed by our ideas or misconceptions about the Reagan era?